I decided to try purchasing my first fleet ship. Jho'dig, my FED Engr and Excelsior fanatic, picked up the Fleet Advanced Heavy Cruiser Retrofit. Only had to purchase one ship module from the C-store. Cost 500 points which is what I get as a monthly stripend. I replaced the default warp core with a very rare one that gives a lot of bonuses to shields. Time to go a tanking.

I love the look of the Odyssey starship and have been wanting to get one. However, my characters are already in very good ships.. Fleet Armitage (Tac), Recluse (Sci), Galor (Eng), Temporal Destroyer (Sci), Breen Chel Grett (Tac), Vesta (Sci), Fleet Ha'feh (Rom-Tac)

So I'm finding it very hard to justify spending zen on the oddy pack. Not sure if I should just get it for fun or save my zen and wait for cryptic to release better ships?

I just started doing STF space elites on my main, after having a mark crisis, and I have a few questions/comments:

-Were Borg spheres always that fast? It's really annoying when they just speed away like they do when you're in an escort with cannons.

-Do Borg have plasma resistance? I put some nice plasma DHC's on a ship, but they seem to have less DPS vs Borg than tetryon DC's on another ship, even considering consoles and such.

-Why is ISE easier than ISN for pubs? Are normal players just that much worse? Even in the dumbest ISE pub I've been in so far, we were able to take out the nodes completely before the mass of nanite spheres came to heal it, even with some special folks not following the 10% rule; but in ISN, that's never happened, and it takes quite a bit longer to take out the nodes, even sometimes failing the optional because the nanite spheres (or even drones!) get through.

-Is there a way to get loadsa Rommie marks like there is with the Borg marks?

I love the look of the Odyssey starship and have been wanting to get one. However, my characters are already in very good ships.. Fleet Armitage (Tac), Recluse (Sci), Galor (Eng), Temporal Destroyer (Sci), Breen Chel Grett (Tac), Vesta (Sci), Fleet Ha'feh (Rom-Tac)

So I'm finding it very hard to justify spending zen on the oddy pack. Not sure if I should just get it for fun or save my zen and wait for cryptic to release better ships?

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If you have the zen and want it, why not? You don't have to make it your main ship for any toon, just something to pull out of the garage when you feel like it.

It's also probably one of the better ships for Tour the Universe, with its extra slipstream time.

There is quite a bit of difference between STF Normale and Elite players.
Everyone who is confident in his ship's abilities and build won't bother with the normals.
I always run Elites straight away even with standard white gear if I have to.
So you really get the bottom of the barrel players who don't really know how to sqeeze some performance out of their ships in the normals.
That costs you a lot of synergy.

Borg are pretty much resistant against everything but not specifically more resistant against plasma than tetryon.
You will cut through shields a bit faster with tetryons and hull typically is dying soon after from the heavy hitter torps.
Plasma is a good pressure weapon to force an enemy to blow his hull heals before his shields go down.
But NPCs in general and Elite STF Borg in particular have so much hitpoints the effect might only be noticable on the probes.

And it's not just the spheres that are faster. A lot of NPC ships have gained a EPtEngines spower. But shperes are cruisers and don't have the turnrate to use it effectively so they always appear to zoom away from the fight (and sometimes get stuck in asteroids or other objects).

Since Legacy of Romulus launched, those borg spheres now move very quickly and are immune to the effects of gravity well 3. In general, they'll fly towards the rear of the gateway so its not hard to position my ship to take them down quickly.

As for player skill... I hate to say this, but yes there is a huge big gap in the skill of a competent player vs a normal player. I have been using a dps parser to track damage per second (dps) in space STFs. I find it is a good proxy of a player's skill level. Some of the weakest players I have seen does only 1-3k dps whereas a typical Elite STF capable player does between 3-5k dps. Personally, my 9 characters each have ships that can dish out between 6-10k dps. The very best players I know have ships that can now dish out 10-20k dps. The most dps I have seen is 25k from a Kumari and 26k from a Jem Hadar Attack Ship.

DPS parsers are a good indicator to measure differences between players performance for damage.
They usually don't take healing and tanking into account directly.
Though a tanking/healing ship has a better chance of staying in combat longer.
A dead DPS dealer will diminish his overall DPS by not firing any weapons for a while.
And then the parsers only take into account actually dealt damage.
They don't measure the raw output I think which can be diminished significantly by resists and defenses.

The ironic thing is that right now, beam arrays and dual beam banks are the weapons that deals the most damage, not Dual Heavy Cannons.

Its gotten to the point that both my science officer's Recluse and engineer's Galor is not only out-damaging my tactical officer's Fleet Armitage, they also out-tank, out-heal and out-science my tac's Fleet Armitage. Especially my Recluse, everyone wants it in their STF runs because this one ship alone is capable of debuffing all nearby enemy ships with 5xAP:Beta III and 1xAP:Beta II. Typically, everyone sees a +3-4k dps boost just by having my Recluse in the team.